This coming October, the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) will celebrate ten years of collaborating with higher education institutions to increase their graduation rates. Our starting goal in 2014 was awarding an additional 68,000 undergraduate degrees above baseline over the next decade – a goal that our 11 founding institutions reached four years early with the graduating class of 2020. Now, not quite ten years out, our member schools have collectively more than doubled our initial target.
Degrees are only one marker of success. We’ve rolled out ten multi-campus collaborative innovation initiatives and are currently harnessing everything we’ve learned to implement an academic recovery project that could transform higher education well beyond the UIA. We’ve also grown our network while maintaining our commitment to quality, collaboration, and accountability. Each new campus that joins our founding universities enriches our mission with fresh ideas and experiences. Beyond our formal expansion, the University Innovation Lab is broadening access to our knowledge and resources.
Following, we offer a few highlights from our 2023 UIA Annual Report.
Growth Through Serving Our Students
In 2023, the UIA welcomed two new institutions, the University of New Mexico and the University at Buffalo, bringing our network to 17. Collectively, our combined members now enroll approximately 520,000 undergraduates, including 164,000 Pell recipients and 180,000 students of color, and award 114,000 annual bachelor's degrees.
UIA institutions are deeply committed to producing more low-income graduates, first generation graduates, and graduates of color across the country, and their efforts are paying off. The founding UIA institutions have now produced 143,201 additional degrees above baseline projections, more than doubling their 2014 ten-year goal of 68,000. Since our baseline year in 2012-2013, we’ve seen:
- A 29% increase overall in annual graduates
- An 89% annual increase in UIA graduates of color
- A 41% annual increase in low-income graduates
It’s important to note that while Ivy League schools and the nation’s top liberal arts programs appear more often in the public eye, UIA institutions enroll and graduate far more students (including Pell grant recipients). We hope to raise awareness that earning an undergraduate degree is still a more attainable goal than many people realize.
Our Current Scale Projects
Collaborative scale projects are what make the UIA an effective force for change. They bring focus and energy to our innovation efforts and demonstrate how universities can work together to solve problems and generate results that surpass anything campuses could accomplish on their own. Successfully scaling innovations requires a total commitment to collaboration, which the UIA advances through our campus convenings and leadership retreats, providing dedicated space for campus teams to share challenges, test solutions, and keep expanding our innovation horizons.
In 2023, we focused intensively on these four scale projects:
- Academic Recovery: Providing financial and academic support for students retaking high-priority courses in which they were previously unsuccessful.
- Student-Centered Redesign: Piloting interventions designed to improve outcomes and experiences for Black students.
- Listening Lab: Elevating and listening to student voices to drive change in policy and program design.
- Doctoral Research Fellows: Enhancing Black student success, evaluating study habits, understanding sophomore students of color, and more.
The University Innovation Lab
The UIA designed the University Innovation Lab (UI Lab) to accelerate learning and idea sharing, diffuse innovative strategies, and provide broad support for implementers to move student success work forward on their campuses. In 2023, we saw rapid growth for the UI Lab as we experimented with resources and offerings ahead of a paid-subscription option that is now available nationwide.
Highlights from 2023 include:
- Increasing our user base by 89% through attracting a diverse array of roles responsible for student success innovation and implementation across UIA campus teams and staff.
- Supporting well over 500 members with a growing resource library and skill- and knowledge-building events throughout the year, including discussions, workshops, panels, and learning cohorts.
- Providing relevant content, as illustrated by the more than 800 lab downloads last year. Our most popular were Logic Models for Program Design and the Future of Advising.
Learn more about joining the Lab.
Diffusion to the Field
Because the UIA is intentionally a small organization, we strive to diffuse our outcomes across the higher ed sector, elevating student success strategies, insights, and leadership examples to redirect collective attention toward inclusion, collaboration, and innovation. Our active and growing social channels, podcast, and newsletter help us share insights and learning with thousands across multiple platforms.
Each month, our newsletter aggregates the best of what we’ve learned, heard, and read. In 2023 we increased the reach of our newsletter by nearly 30%, with more than 10,000 subscribers and a 60% open rate. We invite you to sign up and share with your networks.
Our video podcasts, livestreamed and archived, have continued to surface the ideas and experiences of guests sharing their expertise on student success, innovation, collaboration, and change management. In February, we celebrated episode #100 of the Innovating Together Podcast, and in March we launched our Innovation Spotlight series. Throughout 2023, we produced 42 podcast episodes, 18 University Innovation Lab virtual events, and two Process Mapping learning cohorts. We’re proud to announce that Innovating Together ended the year with 138 episodes, 4.8 stars, and over 100,000 downloads, ranked by Listen Score in the top 2.5% of podcasts globally.
During 2023, the UI Lab blossomed in its offering of webinars and workshops to help higher ed professionals learn student success innovation skills and strategies for making change on their campuses. We also launched Learning Cohorts, six-week learning opportunities that blend live discussion groups with an online course focused on skills needed to innovate for student success. We are expanding the University Innovation Lab and our learning cohort offerings in 2024. You can learn more about campus subscriptions to the Lab on our website.
Innovation Begins With Innovators
The UIA recognizes that, while we seek institution-level results, institutions are powered by people. We value the campus leaders who participate in our events, and we make our workshop-style convenings unique and powerful by prioritizing action and solutions over simply exchanging ideas. Senior leaders, liaisons, and fellows work together to generate solutions, align priorities, and drive initiatives. Participants have time and space to engage directly in problem solving, accelerating the integration of leadership strategies and institutional priorities.
As an organization of, by, and for higher ed leaders, we owe our ongoing success to these three outstanding teams:
- The UIA Board is a group of dynamic, visionary presidents and chancellors who embody our commitment to collaborative strategy innovation that improves student success.
- The UIA Liaisons drive our work with strategic guidance, insight, collaborative efforts, and selfless leadership. They mentor and supervise the UIA Fellows, convene campus student success teams, and ensure organizational accountability.
- The UIA Fellows are the campus leaders of tomorrow, providing us today with the strategic innovation that propels our collaborative work. They lead much of the day-to-day collaborative interaction across campuses and serve as UIA ambassadors at their institutions and beyond. By the end of 2023, there were 18 fellows, the largest group to date.
The UIA’s Outlook for 2024 and Beyond
Already past the first quarter of 2024, we continue to assess the current landscape, understand what our students, states, and nation will need over the next decade, and build on our success to make the American Dream more broadly accessible. We intend to focus on developing and releasing playbooks to share what we’ve learned from our Student-Centered Redesign and Listening Lab projects, and on advancing our Academic Recovery project through a second year of implementation. We’re excited to launch our newest scale project focused on advancing learning innovation and addressing equity gaps in STEM courses. We look forward to sharing with you what we learn – and we want to hear what you're learning.
In fall 2024, we are creating another UIA Summit. The National Summit on Student Success Innovation, taking place October 23-25 in Tempe, AZ, promises to be a culmination of our decade of innovation, collaboration, and transformative insights. And the event won't end there; it will catalyze ongoing collaboratives and momentum through post-event support and the University Innovation Lab. The UIA will continue uniting with institutions that share our passion and commitment to ambitious, meaningful work. Collaboration will remain our rallying cry because, ultimately, silos don't serve students.
Thanks for being part of our movement to redesign higher education around student success!